Days ahead of the second anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision by the Supreme Court that overturned the decadeslong precedent of Roe v. Wade, top Democratic campaign officials zeroed in on abortion as a key issue for their candidates heading into the November elections.

Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee vice chair Sen. Tina Smith and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rep. Suzan DelBene gathered the press on Thursday to highlight the fight over reproductive rights as central to their efforts to win key Senate and congressional races this fall.

“I can tell you that reproductive freedom will be a defining issue in the 2024 Senate elections and every Senate Republican candidate is on the record opposing women's right to make their own personal decisions about their health care and their families,” said Smith, a Minnesota Democrat. “Republicans say that they have a messaging problem on reproductive freedom and abortion care. No, they have a policy program problem because they're on the wrong side of American voters.”

Democrats have effectively used the fight over abortion access since the Dobbs decision in June 2022 to perform better than expected in off-year and special elections as polling suggests the decision and laws proposed and passed by Republican lawmakers are increasingly unpopular. Since the Supreme Court ruling, 14 states have implemented total abortion bans, often with very limited exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research and policy organization. Another seven states have banned abortion at or before 18 weeks of pregnancy and 20 more have bans at some point after eight weeks.

And 13 states have passed laws that would criminalize healthcare providers who perform abortions, according to Human Rights Watch. 

President Joe Biden’s campaign has seized on these laws and highlighted stories of women affected by them. And they announced on Sunday they plan to hold more than 35 events across the country surrounding the Dobbs anniversary on June 24, including in major cities in key battleground states like Detroit, Milwaukee, Atlanta and Philadelphia. Smith, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, actresses Lynda Carter, and women impacted by abortion bans are expected to participate.

Vice President Kamala Harris also sat down with TV personality Chrissy Teigen for a conversation on abortion rights at the White House on Thursday and is expected to hold campaign events in Maryland and Arizona next week centered around the Dobbs decision. 

“With the two-year anniversary falling just days before the first presidential debate, Biden-Harris 2024 is also using this moment to make clear that President Biden and the Biden-Harris campaign will hold Donald Trump accountable for overturning Roe and for his and his MAGA Republican allies’ plans to go even further by banning abortion nationwide if he’s elected,” the campaign said in a statement. “Our campaign is leaving no stone unturned.”

Republicans on the national stage have struggled to coalesce around a coherent policy, with former President Donald Trump alternating between expressing support for some of his party’s more extreme proposals and arguing they should moderate to win elections. Largely, the GOP’s 2024 presumptive presidential nominee has celebrated the end of the federal right to an abortion and taken credit for appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who ultimately ruled in the majority on the Dobbs decision.

“We broke Roe v. Wade. And we did something that nobody thought was possible: we gave it back to the states. And the states are working very brilliantly — in some cases conservative, in some cases not conservative — but they’re working and it’s working the way it’s supposed to,” Trump said at a press conference alongside House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in April.

In an interview with Time magazine earlier this year, Trump said he would leave it up to individual states if they wanted to enforce abortion restrictions by monitoring women’s pregnancies and prosecuting them if they get abortions. Earlier this month, he addressed an anti-abortion Christian group in favor of banning all abortions and encouraged them to stand up for “innocent life.”

“A vote for Trump is a vote to silence our nation's daughters and to take power from our mothers. It's a vote to turn back the clock on the progress that our grandmothers fought so long and so hard for,” Harrison said on Thursday’s press call. “I want you to know that the DNC is putting its foot on the gas, we will make sure that every voter in America, every single one, knows that Donald Trump is responsible for ripping away reproductive rights.”

According to a Gallup poll from last week, 54% of U.S. adults identify as “pro-choice” and just 41% identify as “pro-life,” with a record-low 12% believing abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. That poll also found 51% of Americans believe abortion should be legal “under any/most circumstances,” compared to 45% who believe it should be legal “in only a few/illegal in all circumstances.”

“As we've seen in special election after special election since November of 2022, we've seen just incredible increased turnout because people are standing up for reproductive freedom,” DelBene said. “Absolutely reproductive freedom has been a key component of the message across the country because voters see what's happening.”